Public Citizen’s climate and energy program promotes clean, sustainable and cheap energy. Program goals include pushing for strong regulation of energy markets, educating the public on the dangers of continued reliance on dirty energy sources, helping to solve climate change by promoting localized clean energy alternatives and holding large energy corporations accountable by exposing wrongdoing.

Public Citizen has partnered with multiple environmental and legislature groups in Texas to create and expand energy efficiency measures throughout the state. The organization helped fund Clean Energy for Austin, a group that links nonprofits, businesses and individuals interested in promoting clean energy in the state’s capitol.

In 2001, Public Citizen helped to pass the Texas Emissions Reduction Plan, which strives to ensure clean air in the state. The Reduction Plan has received criticism for including businesses that were awarded grants but failed to meet the plan’s air quality requirements and/or had inaccurate or incomplete information in the plan’s databases.

Latest Posts

February 27, 2014

The United States’ total high-level radioactive waste could fit inside a football stadium with room to spare. Right now, it’s distributed between the country’s 100 commercial nuclear power plants and stored on site. But all that waste could be headed to Texas in the coming years. One of Texas House Speaker Joe Straus’ interim charges for [...]

July 16, 2013

This is part two of a three-part series devoted to looking at efforts to overhaul eminent domain in Texas and what may come next for landowners, pipeline companies, and the oil and gas industry. Read Part One here. At the outset of this year’s regular legislative session, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle filed [...]

June 18, 2013

On Friday, Governor Rick Perry signed several water conservation bills intended to address the state’s drought and water supply problem, and also vetoed a major Ethics Commission sunset bill. The sunset bill, Senate Bill 219, would have required members of the Railroad Commission, the state authority charged with regulating the oil and gas industry, to [...]

May 14, 2013

A name change and several ethics reforms on the table this legislative session for the Railroad Commission of Texas, which oversees oil and gas drilling in the state, have died. The Texas Energy Report was the first with the news, tweeting this afternoon: “RAILROAD COMMISSION SUNSET DEAD FOR THIS SESSION.” After a lengthy review of [...]

December 3, 2012

One of the few coal power plants still being planned in Texas is facing setbacks. The controversial White Stallion Energy Center in Matagorda County had been working with the Texas grid to examine how it will work once its completed, a process called a grid interconnection study. It’s a typical requirement for new power plants, along [...]

November 15, 2012

Three model cars sit side-by-side on the windowsill of Zach Baumer’s office in East Austin, memories of a childhood spent with his family at Indy 500 races. “Growing up in Indianapolis, I just have sort of a thing for cars,” he says. “Not that I think we should be driving single occupancy vehicles! But … [...]

October 1, 2012

On Friday, the Public Utility Commission, which oversees much of the electricity market in Texas, voted to make energy efficiency less of a priority in the power-hungry state. While Texas’ population and industry is booming, not enough new power generation is coming on line to meet energy needs during times of peak demand. In 1999, [...]

September 21, 2012

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has appointed Ron Curry, a former New Mexico Environment Department official, as the new regional administrator of Region Six of the EPA. That area covers Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and New Mexico. In an email to StateImpact Texas, a spokesperson for Region Six of the EPA says that “will provide valuable insight into [...]

March 6, 2012

Yana Skorobogatov of StateImpact Texas researched and reported this article. At a public hearing today in Austin, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality heard from groups worried about proposed changes to the way the state agency tracks emissions and pollution by companies. A proposal before the Commission as part of the state’s sunset review process [...]

January 12, 2012

Just days after the ribbon was cut on the largest solar farm in Texas outside Austin, San Antonio has announced a new solar project that would dwarf its neighbor to the North: a 400 megawatt solar project that would be twice as large as any solar farm currently runningin the world. Some key points: There [...]